The present invention relates to a system and method for evaluating an employee""s performance and competency.
In today""s economy, a company""s most important assets are often its employees. Companies invest substantial resources to recruit, develop, motivate and retain their human resources. Employers offer positive incentives (e.g., promotions, awards, increased responsibility, bonuses) and threaten negative incentives (e.g., demotion, reprimand or termination) to increase productivity.
Employee evaluations are a powerful human resources tool that serve multiple purposes. Managers use evaluation information to make better promotion and reward decisions. Evaluations can be used to provide employees with feedback information, both positive and negative. Positive feedback is important to maintain employee morale, encourage desirable practices, and retain talent. Negative feedback (preferably accompanied by counseling and training) informs employees of areas where they are under-performing so that they can improve. Industrial psychologists have found that the more feedback, positive or negative, employees are given the happier they will be with their job and the better they will perform. Moreover in certain regulated industries, such as the accounting field, performance and competency evaluations can be mandatory. Failure to comply with this requirement can expose companies to significant penalties.
Despite its importance to a company""s bottom line and future, employee evaluation is typically handled in a decentralized and inefficient manner. Typically a company""s evaluation policy calls for periodic evaluations (often annual or biannual). These evaluations often consist of a manager writing out an evaluation, holding a brief counseling session with the employee, and then forwarding the forms to the human resources department. Some managers are more motivated than others to provide constructive and meaningful feedback, but there is no efficient way for the human resources department to supervise the feedback quality. As a result, the quality of feedback that employees receive often varies greatly. Because the process is so decentralized, it is very difficult to effectively disseminate company-wide performance goals, or to consistently evaluate the results achieved. Additionally, because the person evaluating an employee may change periodically, it is difficult to track an employee""s long-term success at meeting goals. Feedback is often given informally, and thus does not become a part of an employee""s permanent record, further exacerbating the continuity problem. The employees typically have no meaningful active participation in the evaluation process, which may leave them unsatisfied or with the belief that their evaluations are arbitrary.
The human resources department expends a significant amount of time and effort supervising the evaluation process. Often, this labor intensive process involves badgering managers who are tardy with evaluations or do not properly sign the forms. In fact, some estimates are that human resources officers spend as much as 50% of their time on these administrative tasks, which do not directly provide value to the evaluation process.
Once the evaluations have been collected from the managers they are typically placed into the employee""s file. Because the evaluation information is stored on paper, or in a non-standardized electronic format, it is prohibitively expensive or even impossible, to run meta-level searches on evaluation data.
In short, current employee evaluation processes often risk being ineffective or inconsistent because they ignore potentially valuable sources of evaluation information, supervising the evaluation process is time consuming and difficult, employers often perceive the evaluation process as ineffective, inconsistent, and arbitrary, and the format of the information does not readily allow for convenient meta-level analysis.
Accordingly, a method, system and tool for evaluating employees is provided that overcomes the shortcomings in the prior art.
In a first aspect of the present invention, a computer-aided method of evaluating personnel performance is provided including the steps of making available to a first user a first electronic form, inputting a first set of data into the first electronic form corresponding to an employee""s evaluation, submitting the first electronic form including the first set of data for review to a second user and inputting a second set of data into the first electronic form corresponding to the second user""s review of the employee.
In another aspect of the present invention a second electronic form is made available to the first user and a third set of data corresponding to the employee""s performance goals is input.
In another aspect of the present invention, the first user is the employee, the first set of data includes the employee""s self evaluation data, the second user is a supervisor of the employee and the second set of data includes the supervisor""s performance evaluation of the employee.
In another aspect of the present invention, the first electronic form including the first and second user data are submitted to a third user for input of a third set of performance evaluation data.
In still another aspect of the present invention, a system is also provided including display means for presenting the electronic forms for personnel evaluation and including means for customizing the electronic forms.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a computer-implemented system and method for automating and streamlining personnel performance evaluations.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a comprehensive employee evaluation method and system that makes available to employees a plurality of electronic forms or interfaces for inputting evaluation data and controls access based on an employee""s role in the evaluation process.
Yet another object of the present invention is to provide a system and method accessible by all employees and administrators for streamlining the collection of evaluation data and the intelligent and fully-informed evaluation of employees based on the collected evaluation data.
Still another object of the present invention is to provide the evaluation system of the present invention with a tool for modifying or customizing any of the electronic forms or interfaces to meet the need of all users.
Still other objects and advantages of the present invention will in part be obvious and will in part be apparent from the specification.
The present invention accordingly comprises the several steps and the relation of one or more of such steps with respect to each of the others, and embodies features of construction, combination of elements, and arrangement of parts which are adapted to effect such steps, all as exemplified in the detailed disclosure hereinafter set forth, and the scope of the invention will be indicated in the claims.